Retail sales facilities such as large department stores typically store overstock products in storage bins located in their stock rooms. A stock room of a retail sales facility may store hundreds, if not thousands of bins, and each storage bin may in turn contain dozens, hundreds, or thousands of products. Since products are binned into the bins after a delivery and picked from the bins to be worked to the sales floor frequently, in order to accurately monitor the on-hand product inventory at a retail sales facility, the associates at the retail sales facility periodically audit the storage bins in the stock room to determine that the bins actually contain the products indicated in the inventory system to be located in those bins. Such bin auditing generally requires an associate to manually scan each of the products in the bin using a hand-held scanner.
Given the large number of products stored in the bins in a stock room of a retail sales facility, bin auditing is a time consuming and voluminous task that increases the operational costs of the retail sales facility. Since the workers at retail sales facilities may have to scan dozens, hundreds, or thousands of products in the bins of the stock rooms when auditing the bins, the likelihood of human error during data entry increases, sometimes leading to inaccurate stocking information and the resulting inefficiencies during subsequent retrieval of products from the bins.
Elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions and/or relative positioning of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of various embodiments of the present invention. Also, common but well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment are often not depicted in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments of the present invention. Certain actions and/or steps may be described or depicted in a particular order of occurrence while those skilled in the art will understand that such specificity with respect to sequence is not actually required. The terms and expressions used herein have the ordinary technical meaning as is accorded to such terms and expressions by persons skilled in the technical field as set forth above except where different specific meanings have otherwise been set forth herein.